Spousal Control Quotes

The husband … might give the wife moderate correction, for as he was to answer for her misbehavior, he ought to have the power to control her.

A wife is sold into the hands of her husband and must endure his embraces though she may have a hundred causes to hate and abominate him.

If a woman earned a dollar by scrubbing, her husband had a right to take the dollar and go and get drunk with it and beat her afterwards. It was his dollar.

Among fifty percent of your married couples, the husband worries very little about what his wife is doing, provided she is doing all he wishes.

I don't think a man should try to suppress a woman just because he's married to her.

[When her husband said her earnings as a married woman belonged to him:] I cannot persuade myself that that which I invent - create, in fact - can belong to anyone but myself! I wish that women could be dealt with, not mercifully, not compassionately, nor affectionately, but justly; it would be so much better - for the men.

I wasn't allowed to speak while my husband was alive, and since he's gone no one has been able to shut me up.

The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband. And in like manner the husband also hath not power of his own body, but the wife.

No one can doubt that the sufferings of the sober, virtuous woman, in legal subjection to the mastership of a drunken, immoral husband and father over herself and children, not only from physical abuse, but from spiritual shame and humiliation, must be such as the man himself can not possibly comprehend.

The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.

Some husbands regard it as their prerogative to compel their wives to fit their standards of what they think to be the ideal.

Since I got married my wife doesn't really let me wear anything that I used to because she says I have no taste at all.

I know not which lives more unnatural lives, obeying husbands, or commanding wives.

Fathers and husbands! do ye not also understand this fact? Do ye not see how, in the mental bondage of your wives and fair companions, ye yourselves are bound?

I think any man who lets a woman pick what he should wear... I mean, you gotta draw the line somewhere as a man. I see these guys, 'My wife told me to wear this!' And I just shake my head.

Up until 1920, women couldn't vote. Until 1974, married women couldn't get their own credit cards or, in some cases, their own loans. Basically, the husband's professional, social, and economic identity covered the individual identity of the wife.

It is a maxim that man and wife should never have it in their power to hang one another.

I tell people I never got to hear Dylan Thomas read because my husband wouldn't let me, because he thought it would be a sort of bad influence. People say, 'And you didn't go?' They're so surprised because the me they know would have gone. And I say I was very much a 'yes, dear' wife.

The wife is in the power of her husband.

He (man) has made her (woman), if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. He has taken from her all right in property. even to the wages she earns.